The letter B has become optical, its shape
Reflecting your glasses. The negative spaces
Have turned to nests, cupping your carved eyes
That death dropped in flight –
It is the spine of a thick Steinbeck that
Stares from my shelf, rods and cones
Bound in the same gray and blue hues of the
Walls of your study. The armchair is fully plaid
By the bedroom window. I sit on the edge of your
Side, a riverine stone. It is too neatly made.
It is too still, that black lion – How it fakes breaking
To a clap of your laughter when my eyes close.
Let me rebuild you, if only for a day. A green spreader
Spilling chalky beads, six cigars stuck as candles,
Hissing their sweet smoke into the air. And now a
Yellow rose from your gray feet, a bloom that blew the
Stars to misalignment with its extreme beam of color.
It must be a monstrous thing, that black vulture.
Always suckling my shadow, the anvil that slept
On my coattails for a summer. It must be to have
Lifted your marble body, wings of sopped tissues,
Taut, carrying you away, away.
No one stands steady in the gust you had
Blocked, my colossus. What a disoriented dynasty,
Hair wind-ripped, shocks piled on our heads of fog.
We are Stringing ties and shrouding ourselves in
Your shirts to cry. Son, Daughter,
Wife. Robbed twice in two years, she felt you
Today. My grandmother, chipped from emerald,
Holding onto your cane. Her sparkle stalls for a
Moment or two, your jewel of all jewels. Channeling with
A wooden avenue, but there are so, so many pieces of you,
So I put back your eyes, softly on your desk next
To maps, ships, busts. The hung sunset to my
Back. Our shaken give-and-take will survive you,
I’ve decided. I will borrow your Shakespeare, your last
Living loan to me.
A molten slide of gold is filling the footsteps
Of a storm and I see it is you, and I am silver,
Sentinel of debris. The black lion stirring on its
Stylobate at the summit of a mountain of books.
Tumbleweed. History. Yes, that is what you will be.
© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH
Reflecting your glasses. The negative spaces
Have turned to nests, cupping your carved eyes
That death dropped in flight –
It is the spine of a thick Steinbeck that
Stares from my shelf, rods and cones
Bound in the same gray and blue hues of the
Walls of your study. The armchair is fully plaid
By the bedroom window. I sit on the edge of your
Side, a riverine stone. It is too neatly made.
It is too still, that black lion – How it fakes breaking
To a clap of your laughter when my eyes close.
Let me rebuild you, if only for a day. A green spreader
Spilling chalky beads, six cigars stuck as candles,
Hissing their sweet smoke into the air. And now a
Yellow rose from your gray feet, a bloom that blew the
Stars to misalignment with its extreme beam of color.
It must be a monstrous thing, that black vulture.
Always suckling my shadow, the anvil that slept
On my coattails for a summer. It must be to have
Lifted your marble body, wings of sopped tissues,
Taut, carrying you away, away.
No one stands steady in the gust you had
Blocked, my colossus. What a disoriented dynasty,
Hair wind-ripped, shocks piled on our heads of fog.
We are Stringing ties and shrouding ourselves in
Your shirts to cry. Son, Daughter,
Wife. Robbed twice in two years, she felt you
Today. My grandmother, chipped from emerald,
Holding onto your cane. Her sparkle stalls for a
Moment or two, your jewel of all jewels. Channeling with
A wooden avenue, but there are so, so many pieces of you,
So I put back your eyes, softly on your desk next
To maps, ships, busts. The hung sunset to my
Back. Our shaken give-and-take will survive you,
I’ve decided. I will borrow your Shakespeare, your last
Living loan to me.
A molten slide of gold is filling the footsteps
Of a storm and I see it is you, and I am silver,
Sentinel of debris. The black lion stirring on its
Stylobate at the summit of a mountain of books.
Tumbleweed. History. Yes, that is what you will be.
© 2015 BENJAMIN SMITH
